The UpTake: Twitter is making sure its mobile advertising offerings are strong, a trick Facebook missed in its IPO. To that end, the micro-blogging service has made its biggest purchase to date in MoPub, a mobile advertising platform.

Dick Costolo, with Twitter steaming toward and expected IPO, appears determined to avoid the big mistake Facebook made in its public debut. The microblogging service is betting big on mobile advertising, making its biggest purchase to date in the space.

Twitter announced Monday it was buying MoPub, a startup with offices in New York and San Francisco that helps mobile publishers manage advertising. Though the price wasn't announced, TechCrunch and All Things D report that it was in the neighborhood of $350 million, all of it in Twitter stock.

The purchase adds muscle to Twitter's already robust effort to cash in on its massive mobile audience, as Kevin Weil, vice president of revenue product at Twitter, writes in a blog post about the acquisition:

The MoPub team has built a leading mobile ad exchange, and their focus on providing transparency to advertisers and publishers aligns with our values. We’ll continue to invest in and improve their core business. In particular, we think there is a key opportunity to extend many types of native advertising across the mobile ecosystem through the MoPub exchange.

We also plan to use MoPub’s technology to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform so our advertisers can more easily automate and scale their buys. We’ll maintain the same high quality standards that define our platform today. Our approach is to show an ad when we think it will be useful or interesting to a user, and that isn’t changing.

This deal also shows the marked contrast between Twitter, which hasn't yet announced it's going public but is expected to be the next giant consumer-focused IPO, and Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), which famously went public, and took more than a year to reach its initial share place.

Since coming aboard with Upstart’s parent company, Kent has covered sustainability and business, entrepreneurs, technology, and venture capital. Now, he covers all the ways upstart businesses get their money.

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